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Simple sentences: A simple sentence has only one clause:
The children were laughing. John wanted a new bicycle. All the girls are learning English.

Complex sentences: A complex sentence is a sentence that contains one independent clause and one or more dependent clauses.
Example: Because life is complex, we need complex sentences.

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apostrophe1: Submit: noun: a punctuation mark (') used to indicate either possession. Example: Harry ' s book ; boys ' coats, or the omission of letters or numbers (e.g. can ' t ; he ' s ; 1 Jan. ' 99 ). You can use apostrophes in two main ways — to indicate a contraction or to show ownership. (Although please note that proper nouns, such as Methodist Ladies’ College, retain their own apostrophes.) Contractions Use an apostrophe to replace omitted letters in a word. don’t couldn’t cont’d Ownership Use an apostrophe to indicate that a noun owns something. Singular nouns take an’s, even if the noun ends with s. David’s performance Lynne Truss’s book Plural and collective nouns not ending in s also take an ’s. children’s playtime the fish’s offspring Plural nouns that end with s have an apostrophe added after the s. the students’ work the lecturers’ seminars If the ‘possessive’ belongs to more than one person, only add an apostrophe to the last person in the grouping. Smith and Maynard’s book about Bob Brown Unless Smith and Maynard have written separate books, in which case it would read: Smith’s and Maynard’s books about Bob Brown Note that both ‘bachelor’s degree’ and ‘master’s degree’, when used in a generic sense, require an apostrophe. While some dislike this convention, it is prescribed by the Macquarie Dictionary (the Australian standard) and the Oxford English Dictionary (the UK standard), and aligns with our key institutional partner Warwick University. Currently you will find the terms used both with and without an apostrophe throughout our online and print publications — gradually, we need to move toward correct usage.

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For most writers, the hyphen's primary function is the formation of certain compound terms. The hyphen is also used for word division, which is briefly explained here. Never use a hyphen in place of an en dash or an em dash. Do not mistake the even narrower hyphen (‐) WITH the em dash (—) AND the slightly narrower en dash (–). Those marks serve different purposes and are further explained in other sections.

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The semicolon is sometimes described as stronger than a comma but weaker than a period. In certain uses, this is a reasonably accurate definition. Yet there is more to the semicolon than that.